Commentary on Joe Clark’s Building Accessible Websites
Last updated 2007-02-05. Thanks to the man himself for comments on this so far. Any mistakes remain mine and mine alone.
General notes
access tags. This is a misuse of the term tag. Just to clarify, consider the following HTML:
<Q CITE="http://www.archives.gov/national-archives-experience/charters/declaration_transcript.html">
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal
</Q>Now that whole example consists of a single Q element. CITE is an attribute of that element, and http://www.archives.gov/national-archives-experience/charters/declaration_transcript.html is the value of that attribute. We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal is the element’s content. <Q> and </Q> are its start and end tags respectively. It’s important when talking to other web designers and developers to use the correct terminology if you wish to be understood. What Clark seems to mean by access tags
is those HTML elements and attributes that are useful to assistive technology but are rarely used by authors. Underused elements and attributes might be a more accurate gloss.
Commentary on Why Bother?
Since Clark wrote this book, a high-profile court case has started in which the NFB is suing Target for making their retail website insufficiently accessible. Clark has offered some commentary on the case at his blog.
Commentary on How do disabled people use computers?
Just to add to Clark’s list of disabilities that should influence web design, how about the fatigued?
Clark claims that: the essence of the Web is text. Almost no Websites lack text altogether, and that cohort tends to cluster around all-Flash experimentation (like Praystation.com); while the Web is the delivery mechanism for such experiments, it is debatable whether they actually are Websites at all rather than online cinema.
But in fact the web was never conceived as text-biased medium, and this is less true today than ever.
Clark complains that although WCAG 1.0 tells us to us to Use the clearest and simplest language appropriate for a site’s content
, it doesn’t offer any techniques for making content accessible to the learning disabled. One technique is to use a restricted vocabulary set like Basic English. Another technique is to use images and video. Sadly, the tokenism of W3C’s concern for learning disabilities remains a problem with the WCAG 2.0 draft.
Commentary on What is media access?
Supplement this chapter with Clark’s own Best practices in online captioning and his new Open & Closed Project. Note that Google Video includes a facility for closed-captioning!
Commentary on The structure of accessible pages
Clark is slightly dismissive of text browsers:
What about “old” browsers like Lynx? Indeed, Lynx is the only example anyone ever cites, because there are very few text-only browsers in the world today and Lynx is the giant squid flailing about in a very small pond. (Other text-only or “console” browsers are WannaBe, Links, and W3M.) Ironically, these programs do a very admirable job of interpreting standard HTML. (Working under severe limitations can force higher quality.) An accessible HTML page remains accessible for these browsers.
There are other browsers well worth mentioning, including ELinks (like Links but with CSS and even some JavaScript support, often used with the Orca screen reader) and Edbrowse (a customization of Ed to create an environment suitable for the blind, with some JavaScript support). Emacspeak, a Aural CSS supporting screen reader for Emacs that creates a complete audio desktop
, can use a variety of text browsers to surf the web. None of these browsers are old; they are all maintained and used, and some are very actively developing. Most of them do a better job of interpreting HTML than Internet Explorer.